Huawei e9000 Blade Server | Features & Price

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Bottom Line:

The Huawei FusionServer is aimed – clearly – at the higher end of the market. At a low price for a four-socket Xeon blade, it is worth trying for mission-critical and HPC applications.

So this unit targets the deep-pocketed enterprise user, who needs (and can pay for) a full suite of features that lower end blades don’t have, from life cycle management to automated firmware upgrades.

Furthermore, the FusionServer enables convergence, which makes this unit a very versatile player in a robust data center.

On a side note, Huawei, a Chinese electronics company, has generated a steady drumbeat of negative news, and the U.S. Department of Justices has served it with an indictment. While this isn’t a comment on the company’s hardware, it may limit adoption for a period.

Product Description:

The FusionServer E9000 converged-architecture blade server enables convergence of computing, storage, networking, and management. It provides a powerful platform for high-end carrier or enterprise applications, as well as data centers, virtualization, mission-critical services, and high-performance computing.

The E9000 chassis provides 16 slots in a 12U chassis that includes redundant Power Supply Units (PSUs), heat-dissipation modules, management modules, and switch modules. It can be installed in a standard 19-inch rack at a depth. The chassis can seat eight full-width or 16 half-width blades. This allows IT to mix lots of smaller two-socket compute nodes with full-width NVMe nodes, I/O expansion nodes and even full-width 4-socket compute nodes. Thus the chassis can support up to 12 NVMe SSDs for high performance applications.

Management features include lifecycle management, automated firmware upgrades, automated OS deployment, stateless computing, and Restful APIs. It has a midplane switching capacity of up to 32 Tb/s and is designed to be upgradable to 100 GbE. Dynamic Energy Management Technology (DEMT) enables energy conservation via component hibernation, automatic power-on/-off for multi-phase power supplies, and speed tuning using the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) algorithm.

“Huawei has a good after-sales service. The product quality is good, rarely issues after being on-line for three years. The business has never been interrupted,” said an IT manager in financial services.

Max Processors/Cores:

Two Xeon Scalable CPUs/56 cores

Maximum Memory

1.5 TB

Form Factor:

Half-width

Key Markets and Use Cases:

• Data centers

• Virtualization

• Mission-critical enterprise applications

• High-performance computing

• Carriers networks

• Private clouds

“The great strength is to be able to use equipment of low cost and to generate a solution of great added value,” said an IT analyst in education.

Price:

Starting at around $3,000